I have come to appreciate my small (by US standards) home. It had started as 1050 sqft when built in 1983, was expanded to about 1230 sqft by the previous owner who converted half of the garage to an extra room that was (originally) used as a bedroom but lacks a closet. That room is now my Gym but mostly filled with junk (to be cleaned out this year). Then I added an external building, the inspiration for this blog, which is now called Lyndhurst. Since that building is fully insulated and finished, actually better than most rooms in my house, it qualifies as additional 167 sqft of "living space" bringing my total to 1397 sqft. The Queen's Room remodeling carves space out of the garage to replace the previous closet resuling in a 10 sqft net increase, bringing the new total to 1407 sqft of total living space.
Beyond that 1407 sqft I also have a half-garage large enough for my Prius (but not for the Tesla Model S I wanted to buy this year). Many people I know do not have a garage at all, having converted it all. I can park the car in the garage and unload groceries without ever stepping outside.
Then I also have an 84 sqft shed for garden tools. (It's actually a top-of-the-line Tough Shed Premier...and that's my lowliest structure).
OK, but back to the 1050 sqft home. It's was a very plain and outdated ranch style (I think) floorplan lacking the combined living/dining room that gives many recent homes that wide open spacious look. This was an unpopular style even in my neighborhood when built in 1983. It was only used in the first phase and does not appear in any later phases.
But I like this floorplan. A lot. Here are the reasons:
1) The separate kitchen/dining area is my #1 area for light relaxing with a bit of wine, browsing the web, listening to music, munching on snacks, watching TV, even producing videos (I did that for awhile). It's AV gluttony and I have audiophile quality stereo and pretty good 5 channel and video as well. I have never seen a room as usable as this for me, principally because most women would not allow a kitchen/dining room to be made into a mancave like this. When I tried to figure how I would fit a room like this in new homes in the 1800-3500 sqft range, I was very disappointed. I have an additional advantage here too. The one and only window, a sliding glass door, faces the back yard. There is no window facing any neighbor. Thus I can play loud music at any time without disturbing anyone, and nobody can see me naked. In addition, neighbors on both sides of my house have no windows facing my house at all. That is an advantage that reaches almost infinite improbability. About the only way you could be equally sure of not disturbing others with loud music would be to live far away from others--at much greater cost or inconvenience.
2) The separate kitchen is fine for parties. Advantageously it permits two groups of friends to commune independently. And yet the opening between living and dining rooms is still large enough I can prepare food for quests in the living room without losing track of what is going on.
3) There are no never-used countertop spaces with bar stools. My previous home had a countertop which I never used except to store junk. It was far nicer to carry my food into the main dining room where I could watch TV. The home I mostly grew up in did have countertop space, and we used it a lot. But times have changed, and I don't live in the kind of family where a countertop would be useful. And besides, my kitchen table, which seats 2 despite all the AV equipment, is much nicer to sit and just as convenient. Countertop spaces work best with strip kitchens, but IMO strip kitchens don't work at all, they feel like prison galleys. Kitchens that are not kitchen-dining rooms are too small or not organized for man cave use, having useless (to me) obstructions like islands.
4) No bedroom windows face the street. The only windows facing the street are in the living room and the garage. Rooms facing the street inherently get more noise and have less privacy. Much better to face the back yard, as my master bedroom does, or the side yard, which my two smaller bedrooms do. There is no great benefit of being able to watch the street from your bedroom window in suburban living. The side windows face the windowless wall of the house next door, so there is no loss of privacy there either. Nicely, the neighbor has a little garden on the side of their house which is the view. That little garden surrounds their air conditioning compressor. I am getting good enough windows to block most of the noise from that. I moved my compressor to the opposite side of the house to reduce noise in the bedrooms, especially in the master bedroom.
5) The master bedroom has the prime location facing the back yard. Now it has a view of my beautiful building Lyndhurst, and the tree garden. Eventually I may add a back door for convenient access to my hot tub (to be built in about 10 years).
6) It has the essential 2 bathrooms. You need two bathrooms to have a "nice" house. Otherwise, people have to wait for the bathroom.
7) It has a laundry room inside, right next to the master bedroom. With both doors closed I can sleep while doing laundry.
8) There are no costly-to-replace and energy-wasting huge expanses of windows, just the right and modest amount of glazing for each room.
9) The living room is (though just barely) large enough for the sort of parties I like. I have hosted over 100 discussion and movie watching parties at my home.
Now compare my home (I can't find diagram unfortunately) to this example of a small three bedroom ranch home:
http://www.homeplans.com/plan-detail/HOMEPW19399/three-bedroom-ranch
The Kitchen area is too small and shaped wrong to be used as I do. The two small bedrooms face front. The laundry room is far away from the bedrooms. The main entry door wastes living room space, which is already smaller than mine and has very limited wall space for book cases and entertainment system. The master bathroom, where I sometimes head when arriving home, is at the farthest location from car and main entry. This quaint design also has carport instead of garage. It does have one advantage--there is a nice if smallish separate dining area (called breakfast room though it functions as the dining room in this house). I have never needed that, though I often think about adding one for a partnered lifestyle (most partners would think the lack of a dining room to be a significant limitation. But I wouldn't give up the advantages I have for that. I don't want to give up actual comfort and convenience of the fantasies of having a family lifestyle that I don't have.
When I grew up my family had a 3/2/2 home which got garage fully converted to family room and very extended 2nd bedroom for my college age sister. The bedroom extension was incredible, it gave that room a sliding back door to the back patio area which featured a small decorative garden with statue right at that point, then opening to larger covered patio areas, large pool, 3 large fruit trees in independent pods. And it was the only bedroom having the hilltop view of the San Fernando Valley as well. (Uselessly, the only other two original rooms to have that view were the bathrooms.)
But this was all my mother's fantasy. The reality was that my sister only lived with us in that home for 3 years, then went off to 4 year college in another state. For most of the 14 years we owned that home, nobody lived in the super improved bedroom with access to the pool. It was a junk room. Meanwhile, I lived in that house for 13 years in a 10x10 bedroom with small window.
The family room got used a lot, and it was really the nicest room in the house, with full glass view of the San Fernando Valley. But that room really just displaced the formal living room which faced the pool. That living room was only rarely used. I have seen many other homes with formal living rooms that are almost never used. In some cases, people just keep a covering on the furniture mostly.
After conversion, there was no garage, of course. Mother had a carport built along the side of the garage going deep to the side. The carport quickly filled with junk, and beyond the covered part a lot of more junk that got weatherbeaten over time. Cars were parked in the driveway, thereby usually blocking the great view.
The master bedroom had window facing the street. It was noisy and useless. The bed was actually pushed up to that window, so you looked at the wall instead of out the window when lying in bed.
The worst story of all was the pool. We used the pool heavily for about 5 years. After some time, it never got used again. It was a big pain to maintain, I was assigned that task, and I never did it. I envied richer familes that had automated pool cleaning systems or pool service. The pool turned green. It was basically a swamp about half of the time we lived in that home. Then we had to spend a fortune to fix it up when we sold the house. I've learned my lesson on that. While I still want a backyard hot tub (it may be just part of my fantasy) I'm not going to build one until I get very close to retirement age.
Beyond that 1407 sqft I also have a half-garage large enough for my Prius (but not for the Tesla Model S I wanted to buy this year). Many people I know do not have a garage at all, having converted it all. I can park the car in the garage and unload groceries without ever stepping outside.
Then I also have an 84 sqft shed for garden tools. (It's actually a top-of-the-line Tough Shed Premier...and that's my lowliest structure).
OK, but back to the 1050 sqft home. It's was a very plain and outdated ranch style (I think) floorplan lacking the combined living/dining room that gives many recent homes that wide open spacious look. This was an unpopular style even in my neighborhood when built in 1983. It was only used in the first phase and does not appear in any later phases.
But I like this floorplan. A lot. Here are the reasons:
1) The separate kitchen/dining area is my #1 area for light relaxing with a bit of wine, browsing the web, listening to music, munching on snacks, watching TV, even producing videos (I did that for awhile). It's AV gluttony and I have audiophile quality stereo and pretty good 5 channel and video as well. I have never seen a room as usable as this for me, principally because most women would not allow a kitchen/dining room to be made into a mancave like this. When I tried to figure how I would fit a room like this in new homes in the 1800-3500 sqft range, I was very disappointed. I have an additional advantage here too. The one and only window, a sliding glass door, faces the back yard. There is no window facing any neighbor. Thus I can play loud music at any time without disturbing anyone, and nobody can see me naked. In addition, neighbors on both sides of my house have no windows facing my house at all. That is an advantage that reaches almost infinite improbability. About the only way you could be equally sure of not disturbing others with loud music would be to live far away from others--at much greater cost or inconvenience.
2) The separate kitchen is fine for parties. Advantageously it permits two groups of friends to commune independently. And yet the opening between living and dining rooms is still large enough I can prepare food for quests in the living room without losing track of what is going on.
3) There are no never-used countertop spaces with bar stools. My previous home had a countertop which I never used except to store junk. It was far nicer to carry my food into the main dining room where I could watch TV. The home I mostly grew up in did have countertop space, and we used it a lot. But times have changed, and I don't live in the kind of family where a countertop would be useful. And besides, my kitchen table, which seats 2 despite all the AV equipment, is much nicer to sit and just as convenient. Countertop spaces work best with strip kitchens, but IMO strip kitchens don't work at all, they feel like prison galleys. Kitchens that are not kitchen-dining rooms are too small or not organized for man cave use, having useless (to me) obstructions like islands.
4) No bedroom windows face the street. The only windows facing the street are in the living room and the garage. Rooms facing the street inherently get more noise and have less privacy. Much better to face the back yard, as my master bedroom does, or the side yard, which my two smaller bedrooms do. There is no great benefit of being able to watch the street from your bedroom window in suburban living. The side windows face the windowless wall of the house next door, so there is no loss of privacy there either. Nicely, the neighbor has a little garden on the side of their house which is the view. That little garden surrounds their air conditioning compressor. I am getting good enough windows to block most of the noise from that. I moved my compressor to the opposite side of the house to reduce noise in the bedrooms, especially in the master bedroom.
5) The master bedroom has the prime location facing the back yard. Now it has a view of my beautiful building Lyndhurst, and the tree garden. Eventually I may add a back door for convenient access to my hot tub (to be built in about 10 years).
6) It has the essential 2 bathrooms. You need two bathrooms to have a "nice" house. Otherwise, people have to wait for the bathroom.
7) It has a laundry room inside, right next to the master bedroom. With both doors closed I can sleep while doing laundry.
8) There are no costly-to-replace and energy-wasting huge expanses of windows, just the right and modest amount of glazing for each room.
9) The living room is (though just barely) large enough for the sort of parties I like. I have hosted over 100 discussion and movie watching parties at my home.
Now compare my home (I can't find diagram unfortunately) to this example of a small three bedroom ranch home:
http://www.homeplans.com/plan-detail/HOMEPW19399/three-bedroom-ranch
The Kitchen area is too small and shaped wrong to be used as I do. The two small bedrooms face front. The laundry room is far away from the bedrooms. The main entry door wastes living room space, which is already smaller than mine and has very limited wall space for book cases and entertainment system. The master bathroom, where I sometimes head when arriving home, is at the farthest location from car and main entry. This quaint design also has carport instead of garage. It does have one advantage--there is a nice if smallish separate dining area (called breakfast room though it functions as the dining room in this house). I have never needed that, though I often think about adding one for a partnered lifestyle (most partners would think the lack of a dining room to be a significant limitation. But I wouldn't give up the advantages I have for that. I don't want to give up actual comfort and convenience of the fantasies of having a family lifestyle that I don't have.
When I grew up my family had a 3/2/2 home which got garage fully converted to family room and very extended 2nd bedroom for my college age sister. The bedroom extension was incredible, it gave that room a sliding back door to the back patio area which featured a small decorative garden with statue right at that point, then opening to larger covered patio areas, large pool, 3 large fruit trees in independent pods. And it was the only bedroom having the hilltop view of the San Fernando Valley as well. (Uselessly, the only other two original rooms to have that view were the bathrooms.)
But this was all my mother's fantasy. The reality was that my sister only lived with us in that home for 3 years, then went off to 4 year college in another state. For most of the 14 years we owned that home, nobody lived in the super improved bedroom with access to the pool. It was a junk room. Meanwhile, I lived in that house for 13 years in a 10x10 bedroom with small window.
The family room got used a lot, and it was really the nicest room in the house, with full glass view of the San Fernando Valley. But that room really just displaced the formal living room which faced the pool. That living room was only rarely used. I have seen many other homes with formal living rooms that are almost never used. In some cases, people just keep a covering on the furniture mostly.
After conversion, there was no garage, of course. Mother had a carport built along the side of the garage going deep to the side. The carport quickly filled with junk, and beyond the covered part a lot of more junk that got weatherbeaten over time. Cars were parked in the driveway, thereby usually blocking the great view.
The master bedroom had window facing the street. It was noisy and useless. The bed was actually pushed up to that window, so you looked at the wall instead of out the window when lying in bed.
The worst story of all was the pool. We used the pool heavily for about 5 years. After some time, it never got used again. It was a big pain to maintain, I was assigned that task, and I never did it. I envied richer familes that had automated pool cleaning systems or pool service. The pool turned green. It was basically a swamp about half of the time we lived in that home. Then we had to spend a fortune to fix it up when we sold the house. I've learned my lesson on that. While I still want a backyard hot tub (it may be just part of my fantasy) I'm not going to build one until I get very close to retirement age.
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